The technical aspects

There are many technical aspects in terms of the choice of which IDP to choose and it is not easy to scrutinize all of them.

We can definitely start with an initial distinction that connects the dots with the initial part of the book when we mentioned how the cloud era is affecting the identity landscape: one of the initial choices is whether to have a hosted IDP or a cloud IDP. By hosted IDP, we mean an IDP that needs to be installed and maintained by the enterprise on its server or in its data center. In this case, the enterprise is responsible from end to end and needs to have a dedicated team to take care of the entire stack. This is a legacy approach and companies tend to use SaaS IDPs in which the service doesn’t need to be installed or updated, as it is part of the purchased service by the specific cloud provider. We’re going to call these kinds of IDPs cloud-based, and there is a clear trend nowadays toward cloud-based IDPs.

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